Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor speaks at the Company’s ‘Watts Next’ event on Wednesday, July 1.
By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
Following Valar Atomics’ ‘Watts Next’ event on Wednesday, July 1, Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor joined Castle Country Radio for a conversation regarding the company’s newly announced partnership with Nvidia, the community reception to the company and what comes next for nuclear energy in the Castle Country.
Opening our conversation, Taylor spoke of the company’s partnership with Nvidia, which is exploring the deployment of a 30-megawatt AI factory utilizing new technologies that would operate with “nearly zero water consumption” in Emery County. Taylor explained how this technology would work.
“There’s two sides to that equation. The first side is the data center itself, right? And Nvidia has designed a new system where they can raise the temperature of the coolant, which makes it unnecessary to have water extracted from the community. They can use just air cooling,” said the CEO. “On our side, we have a high-temperature gas reactor, and the high temperatures of that reactor also make it unnecessary to use water cooling. And we already cooled this reactor today, as it’s standing here only with air. So you combine these two technologies, and you have a path to scaling data centers and AI factories without any water load on local communities.”
Switching gears, Taylor discussed the community’s reception to the company and their work in Emery County: “We’ve been completely blown away. I mean, we picked this community for many reasons. And one of the foremost is that this is an energy county. I was at the local Fatty’s diner here, and I saw a poster on the wall that said ‘Emery County,’ and it’s got the electricity markings on it, right? People here understand power, and we really wanted to move into a place that understood power. And of course, it’s coal power, but coal and nuclear have a lot of symbiosis together.”
He continued, “We really just want cheap energy. We serve the same goals. And so we expected it to go well, and it’s gone 10 times better than we could have ever imagined. I mean, the community here has been so embracing. They have given us all of the food that we need. We have local restaurants delivering food to the site here every day. I’ve used hotels, Airbnbs, and transportation resources, and everyone has been so friendly. So we’re incredibly grateful to be here in Emery County.”
Looking back, Taylor recounted the emotion in the room when Ward250 reached criticality, describing the moment as “euphoric”.
“We had people tearing up and people giving each other hugs and slapping each other’s backs and clapping. I mean, it’s been an unbelievably hard effort from this team that I have pictures of the whole team asleep at various places around the factory floor and their desks. And we’ve worked incredibly hard for it, but it’s very worth it on a day like today.”
The CEO also touched on safety, explaining the recent loss-of-forced-cooling demonstration performed on the Ward250 reactor, and what it means for the technology: “Loss-of -forced-cooling is the initiating event that caused both Fukushima and Three Mile Island. And so it’s a very serious event in nuclear for the traditional reactor designs. Now, there’s a new set of designs called Gen 4 designs that actually are tolerant to loss of force cooling events.”
Taylor further elaborated: “And what that means is if the same things happen to us that happened to Fukushima, that is, we lose our cooling pumps for some reason, we don’t experience a meltdown. And we actually just proved that a week ago. We took our reactor to full power, and we did exactly that; we turned off all cooling systems. And we just watched what happened, and the reactor safely and slowly cooled down to a safe temperature.”
Changing topics, Taylor examined what comes next for Ward250 after achieving criticality and producing power, “Ward 250 here is going to continue going through its tests. We want to make sure we really, really understand the character of the system. And we’ve tested everything that we want to test. And then we’re going to go build the next reactor right here.”
Throughout the process of pushing Ward250 to produce power, Valar faced many detractors questioning the project’s viability and feasibility, and its lofty goal of going critical by July 4. After achieving this goal, Taylor shared a message for these initial detractors.
“I think people needed to see that we were serious, right? They needed to see that we could actually build hardware, that it would actually be safe. Anytime a startup begins, there’s a lot of people who say, ‘Well, is that really going to work or not?’ And that’s OK. That’s part of starting a company,” said Taylor. “But now that we’ve gone out and hit these milestones, and a lot of the people who were detractors in the beginning are actually here today, and they’re celebrating with us.”
Looking at eastern Utah as a whole, Taylor spoke on the future he envisions for Valar in the area: “We’re super excited about Utah. I think that Utah is very open and accepting of energy in general, wants to be part of the future, wants to build. And so we’re really excited to scale out here. We think of this as our home, and we’re ready to build more.”
Closing our conversation, Taylor shared what he wants the public to know about nuclear energy.
“I would want them to know that nuclear energy is the safest energy source in the world and soon it’ll be the cheapest,” said Taylor. “And that’s where the future comes from.”